Chainlink's Pangea Project: 47 Banks, 2 Stablecoins, 1 Atomic Swap to the Rescue

Chainlink has joined Project Pangea, a banking coalition spanning 37 European and more than 10 South Korean commercial banks, to test stablecoin-based foreign-exchange settlement, the company announced Tuesday. The initiative groups Chainlink with euro stablecoin consortium Qivalis, the Unified Korea Alliance (UniKA), and South Korean digital asset infrastructure firm FairSquareLab, and targets live transactions within a legal and regulatory compliance framework within the next 12 months, according to Niki Ariyasinghe, Chainlink's vice president of Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.

The working group aims to move FX settlement from a traditional 48-hour (T+2) timeline toward near-instant (T+0) settlement using regulated euro- and South Korean won-pegged stablecoins exchanged through atomic payment-versus-payment (PvP) mechanisms, in which both sides of a currency trade settle simultaneously or not at all. The coalition represents banks with collectively over $10 trillion in assets under management and is initially focused on the Europe–South Korea trade corridor, which processes more than $150 billion in goods and services annually. Ariyasinghe framed the effort as more than a technical exercise. "This is not just a POC," he said. "Everyone's coming in with their eyes wide open. Appetite is very much about building real infrastructure ... The target is live transactions within a legal, regulatory compliance framework within the next 12 months."

Project Pangea is designed to operate as middleware, allowing banks to initiate transactions through existing Swift and ISO 20022 systems while settling on the Pangea L1 blockchain network. Chainlink's data infrastructure will handle the translation layer alongside FairSquareLab's onchain FX settlement technology. The initiative is positioned as a working group rather than a live payment network, and no production implementation timeline has been announced.

The project lands amid a broader push by financial institutions to evaluate stablecoins for wholesale infrastructure rather than consumer payments. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the global foreign exchange market processes roughly $9.6 trillion in daily trading volume, while industry data cited by Chainlink indicates that 60% of all global stablecoin payments are occurring in Asia. Ariyasinghe said he agreed with that figure, adding: "In less developed financial ecosystems, demand is growing, but the infrastructure isn't necessarily in place. These forms of tokenized cash are fulfilling a real need."

Citigroup projects the global stablecoin market will grow to $1.9 trillion by 2030 from roughly $315 billion today, with an optimistic forecast of as much as $4 trillion. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse recently described stablecoins as having a "ChatGPT moment" as more institutions evaluate the technology, while fintech startup OpenFX recently raised $94 million to expand its stablecoin-based payments network in Southeast Asia and Latin America.